How to Make Lines With Arrowheads in Flash

The Adobe Flash software offers digital animators the tools to compile extremely intricate items such as games, video clips and interactive website features, but falls short with some of its included tools. This doesn’t mean you have to skip adding items such as arrowhead lines to your work. Instead, you can get creative with workarounds to draw lines by hand, which gives you custom control over each line’s appearance.

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Instructions

1

Start Adobe Flash. Click “Flash Document” in the middle of the startup screen. A blank stage and a new blank timeline appear in the main portion of the Flash screen.

2

Click the "Line" tool near the top of the Tools pane at the left of the screen. If the “Property Inspector” at the bottom of the stage doesn’t open, click it to open it. The line formatting options appear.

3

Double-click the small black-colored square to the right of the pencil icon. Choose a color for the arrowhead line or leave black as the default.

4

Click the drop-down menu for the thickness of the line, which shows “1” by default. Increasing this number increases the width of the arrowhead line.

5

Position the cursor at the left or top of the stage. Press and hold the “Shift” key. Drag the cursor left to right or top to bottom to form the main body of the line. Release the “Shift” key.

6

Position the cursor at a diagonal to the line you just drew. Draw a line to form one-half of the arrow.

7

Draw the other half of the arrowhead. It doesn’t matter if the lines don’t meet the tip of the body line.

8

Click the “Selection” tool, the black arrow at the top left of the Tools section. Click the first slanted line and drag it into place to form the first part of the arrowhead. Adjust the other line to complete the arrowhead.

Tips & Warnings

You can also make lines with arrowheads in an existing Flash document. To add them, open the document from the Welcome screen. Drag the timeline indicator to the keyframe to add the arrowhead and follow the above instructions, or add a new frame by right-clicking the timeline and selecting “Insert Blank Keyframe,” then adding the arrowhead line.